Jigami History

At long last, I wrapped up my first iPhone application, Jigami!

Looking at my notebook, the earliest record of it I can find is from 10 December 1991. I had apparently done a Mac prototype by February 1992, and continued to refine it (the next version I saved is from February 1993).

I took about 3 days to port it to NewtonScript in August 1993, and then Scott Shwarts and I polished it. As near as I can tell, we finished it in December 1993. Apple briefly published it as Jigsaw Strategy Game, but then decided they didn’t want to be in the game business, and we got the rights back and distributed it ourselves for a while.

The game was always intended for a handheld device, and in October 2008 I started an iPhone version. I got it working, but the UI wasn’t quite right. The original Newton version used a stylus, so you simply touched a piece and moved it directly. But doing the same thing with your finger meant you couldn’t see the piece you were moving. This is pretty important, since you need to see the shape and symbols. It took me a while to finally accept that the piece had to be moved out from under your finger. Suddenly the game became fun again.

I thought it would be cool to rotate with a gesture, and managed to get this working. But it nobody liked it, even though you could rotate by any amount (±270°). So I implemented a second tap. Everyone preferred this, even though rotating could now take up to 3 taps.

Autorotation was suggested by someone at the Casual Connect conference (sorry, I don’t remember who to credit).

The game was now better than the Newton version, but it still needed a lot more polish. I put in two more AI levels and a bunch of animation. Finally, I got Dalton Webb to do professional artwork. (You can see some of the art progress at the A Sharp Facebook page.)

The original game was available in English, French, German, and Japanese. Unfortunately, I couldn’t just use the original text, because minor things had changed. I didn’t get all of those in the first release, but Laurent Aillet gave me a French translation, and I hope to get more.

I actually submitted the game to the App Store last night, but one of my testers just sent me a crash log and I was able to figure out that it was not the crash I had fixed. Although it seemed to happen only on 2.2 devices (which are a definite minority), I thought it was worth getting right. So I rejected the binary, fixed the bug, and resubmitted it.

That puts me back at the end of the queue, but the silver lining is that I was able to submit French keywords (I had forgotten to get them localized). This is one piece of metadata that Apple doesn’t let you change at will.

Hopefully I’ll have the end of the story in a few days: release. Well, really it will be a new beginning, since I have a number of updates planned…

6 Different Beers

For my birthday, I got some beers I don’t usually drink (thank you Dav), so I thought I’d mention them.

I opened the Elysian Night Owl Pumpkin Ale with trepidation, but it had no pumpkin flavor I could detect (though they say it’s brewed with pumpkin and pumpkin seeds), only somewhat subtle pumpkin pie spices. Alcohol content was 5.9%. Overall, I’d say it was mild.

By contrast, drinking Sam’l Smith organic cherry fruit ale really seemed more like drinking cherry juice than beer. I didn’t notice the alcohol going down, though I guess it was there (no percentage was listed). Nice and fruity, rather than the uneasy mix that flavored beers often are.

I expected Lip Stinger (from McTarnahan’s) to be spicy, since it was “fermented with peppercorn.” Apparently they meant the singular — I could detect no pepper. It was just a beer. Alcohol content was 4.8%.

Fat Scotch Ale from Silvery City Brewery was just what I expected: scotch ale. I’m not sure what makes it that way — “a touch of peat character” I suppose. Alcohol content was 9%, which is probably also what makes it taste like what I expected.

Elysian’s The Immortal IPA was a nice India pale ale, definitely hoppy. 6.3% alcohol content.

Bear Republic’s Hop Rod Rye was slightly bitter but not at all unpleasant. 8% alcohol content.

So what was my favorite? Probably Fat Scotch Ale, as the most distinctive. And Lip Stinger seemed oddly lacking in character.

Previewing Jigami

I put a more official announcement here (with info on becoming a beta tester), but I am bringing my first published game (Apple called it Jigsaw Strategy Game when they briefly published it for Newton) to iPhone (and iPod touch). The game was intended to be played on a handheld, and take only a few minutes to play, so I think it should work pretty well on iPhone. Of course, it will need a little updating from the black & white original pictured here. I’ll be posting more about that in the future.

Open Project in Xcode

One really nice feature (not sure if it’s new in 3.2 or if I hadn’t noticed it before) is how you can look at sample code.

API documentation has a link to sample code that uses the call. Click that link, and from the sample code page, click “Open Project in Xcode.” The project is downloaded and, well, opens in Xcode. Very nice integration.

Update to Opal

As I mentioned, I am using the new clang compiler and LLVM back end in the latest update (version 1.2.5) to my Opal outliner. I couldn’t really detect any differences in performance, but I’ll take the faster compiles!

The clang code analyzer did find a number of minor memory leaks, mostly in things that are less common, like printing or using the bookmark popup. So this release is cleaner than ever.

A Retro Future?

I guess each generation is going to use technology differently, but it seems odd that my granddaughters prefer using MySpace to contact people, rather than e-mail *. This means they can only contact people who are on MySpace — for example, excluding me. It reminds me of the old days, when my editor set me up with an MCI Mail account so I could contact him. And most of my contacts were on CompuServe. It was a huge day when the services finally started sending e-mail to each other (and even longer before everyone got standardized into the name@domain addresses).

I hope we don’t go back to the old days!

* My granddaughters do use SMS, but due to its cost structure, text messages aren’t really a universal medium.

There’s a twist

Even though I’m happy enough with iTunes, I wanted to check out doubleTwist. But they have a huge barrier to entry: when you launch the application on your computer, you need to create an account.

That almost made me quit right there, but I decided to check out the fine print, as per the links in the dialog.

Oops, they made the whole thing the check box! When you click the blue text, it doesn’t show you the Privacy Policy, it activates the check.

And when I want to the web site to post a question about this, they wanted me to register first.

So much for doubleTwist. I’m not giving someone my e-mail without knowing more.

Addendum: Apparently Help > Contact Support uses regular e-mail, so there is at least a standard way to contact them.